Ida by Lamplight

Ida by Lamplight | Sitcom

Workshop Presentations

Public Presentation

Friday, August 8, 2025
3:15 p.m. • Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall
Ticket Price: $15

Ida by Lamplight is the third chamber opera to be realized from Jerre Dye’s anthology libretto The Summer Place, commissioned by the Chautauqua Opera Guild, which captures Chautauqua Institution’s history from its founding through today. Jeremy Gill, Chautauqua Opera Company’s 2016 composer-in-residence, will set the 20-minute score. Ida by Lamplight invites the audience into the office of The Chautauquan, late one night in 1886. Ida Tarbell, managing editor of The Chautauquan, and Kate Kimball, an early leader of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC) read and answer letters to the nascent CLSC as they survey the profound effect their work is having on thousands of readers across the United States. Commissioned by Chautauqua Opera Company to celebrate The 150^th anniversary of Chautauquan Daily in 2026, Ida by Lamplight will be given a one-week workshop, capped by a public reading with piano accompaniment.

MUSIC
Jeremy Gill

LIBRETTO
Jerre Dye

SUNG IN
English

Sitcom

The neo-baroque comic chamber opera Sitcom, with music by Luke Styles and libretto by Alan McKendrick, was developed in collaboration with Opera Philadelphia and Producing Fund Partner Andrew Martin Weber. Sitcom will receive a ten-day workshop with harpsichord accompaniment at Chautauqua. As in classic television sitcoms, the opera’s four main characters are delightfully trapped in the eternal present of their own worlds. Conceived as four 30-minute “episodes,” each episode will take Max, Bettina, Joan and Vendetta on hugely transformative journeys, but crucially return each of them to their status quo for the beginning of the next episode. Chautauqua Opera will workshop 60 minutes of the score, with a public presentation to wrap up the final week of the 2025 season.

MUSIC
Luke Styles

LIBRETTO
Alan McKendrick

SUNG IN
English

Creatives

Ida by Lamplight

Jeremy Gill

Composer

The music of American composer, conductor and pianist Jeremy Gill is celebrated for its emotional breadth and diversity of expression. His vocal music ranges from “vibrant settings” of texts by Blaise Pascal (Gramophone) for vocal sextet through song settings of texts by Italo Calvino, Anne Carson, Ann Patchett, and Georg Trakl to “vividly colored” (The New York Times) dramatic reworkings of ancient Greek texts and modern authors like Don Nigro and Michael Zand. His orchestral music is “replete with imaginative textures” (The Dallas Morning News) and includes concertos, tone poems and symphonies.

Notable recent premieres include Tout le monde à la fois, an Eastman Centennial commission for massed oboes, oboes dʼamour, English horns, bassoons, and contrabassoons; Corvus Mythicus, commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the installation of Dutch artist Arie Van Selmʼs “Crow” sculpture at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas; Motherwhere: Bagatelles for Strings, after Bán, a concerto for string quartet and string orchestra, commissioned by New York Classical Players for the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet; Concerto dʼavorio, a four-hand piano concerto premiered by Orion Weiss and Shai Wosner with the Chautauqua Symphony under JoAnn Falletta; and The Journey, premiered by soprano Marianna Suri, bass-baritone Chuma Sijeqa, and the Citizens of the World Choir under Jeremyʼs direction at the Illuminate Rotherhithe migration festival in London. The Journey was selected to close Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2022, also in London, featuring the same cast.

The 2024–25 season features world premieres with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, soprano Robin Johannsen and the Harrisburg Symphony, and pianist Anna Kijanowska. He has served as the composer-in-residence with Chautauqua Opera, the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival.

Jerre Dye

Librettist, Ida by Lamplight

Jerre Dye is a Chicago-based director, librettist, playwright and performer. He has spent over three decades focusing primarily on developing new works for theatre and opera. He is especially passionate about collaborative expression, site-specific work, and community-based projects. Dye received the Award for Dramatic Literature from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Some opera commissions include: the upcoming Woman With Eyes Closed for Pittsburgh Opera and Opera Philadelphia in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize and two-time, Grammy Award-winning composer Jennifer Higdon; Taking Up Serpents for Washington National Opera with composer Kamala Sankaram; The Transformation of Jane Doe for Chicago Opera Theatre with composer Stacy Garrop; The Falling and the Rising for the U.S. Army Field Band and Chorus, Seattle Opera, Opera Memphis, Arizona Opera, San Diego Opera, Texas Christian University and Seagle Music Colony with composer Zachary Redler; and Pretty Little Room for Opera Memphis with composer Robert Patterson.

Short form operas include: Opera 901 for Opera Memphis with composers Kamala Sankaram, Sam Shoup, Zach Redler and Robert Patterson; Portraits for the U.S. Army Field Band and Chorus and Seattle Opera with composers Damien Geter and Tim Takach; Parksville, a filmed, virtual reality opera for Opera on Tap/New York with composer Kamala Sankaram; and Ghosts of Crosstown for Opera Memphis with composers Zachary Redler, Kamran Ince, Nathaniel Stookey and Jack Perla. He is currently in process for two, site-specific operas: The Cabinets with composer Kamala Sankaram for Opera on Tap and The Singing Rooms with composer Larry Axelrod. His plays include Cicada, Distance, Short/Stories, Threads, The New Adventures of Hansel and Gretel, Wild Swans, and Live Studio Audience. He is also developing a new musical, Self Storage, with Zachary Redler.

Sitcom

Luke Styles

Composer

Luke Styles is a British Australian composer whose work is performed regularly throughout the world. Styles was the first Glyndebourne Young Composer in Residence, the first composer-in-residence at the Foundling Museum since Handel, and the 2022 British Council Musician in Residence to Brazil. He is the artistic director of the Deal Festival.

His recent triptych of orchestral and vocal works premiered at the Three Choirs Festival (UK), the Musée du quai Branly (Paris), and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl (Melbourne) by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Le Balcon. From these works, No Friend but the Mountains has been turned into a two-part ABC TV documentary and will receive its UK premiere at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra in June 2025.

Styles has composed eight operas for opera houses, festivals and orchestras around the world. His Macbeth was performed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, and his Awakening Shadow premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival, Presteigne Festival and received a second production by Sydney Chamber Opera in 2022.

Styles is published by G.Schirmer and Belle Symphonie.

Alan McKendrick

Librettist

Alan McKendrick is a Scottish writer, director and translator working across theater, film and opera.

Work as a writer/director includes an adaptation of Alexander Trocchi’s cult novel Cain’s Book (Untitled Projects/Arches); nuclear proliferation satire Finished With Engines (Arches/Traverse); video-theatre work The Mass Launching of Jawline Sabbatical (BBC/Hopscotch Films/National Theatre of Scotland); and sci-fi jailbreak avant-rock musical Cadaver Police in Quest of Aquatraz Exit (Staatstheater Nürnberg/National Theatre of Scotland).

Writing projects include Oh Graveyard, You Can’t Hold Me Always (RCS); Ophelia (Òran Mór); The Eye (Untitled Projects); and All Howl at Once (Aldeburgh Festival), a goth song cycle for goth and non-goth children.

McKendrick has made further work with various organizations including Bayerische Staatsoper, Malmö Opera, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, HAU Berlin, Glasgow International, GoMA, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, La Nuova Musica, Opera Philadelphia and Riot Group.

Steven Osgood

Conductor

This is Steven Osgood’s tenth season as General and Artistic Director of the Chautauqua Opera Company. During his tenure the company has produced operas by Puccini, Verdi, Mozart and Humperdinck alongside contemporary works by Missy Mazzoli, John Corigliano, Philip Glass and others. In 2024 he conducted the world premieres of A.E. Reverie and Love, Loss and the Century Upon Us — two chamber operas commissioned by Chautauqua Opera. With the 2025 season, the company drawn on his vast experience in the development of new works with the New Opera Workshops.

Steve has conducted the world premieres of over 20 operas, including in recent seasons The Rising World at Seoul Arts Center, Intimate Apparel at Lincoln Center Theater, Breaking the Waves at Opera Philadelphia, JFK at Fort Worth Opera, The Scarlet Ibis, Thumbprint, Blood Moon, and Sumeida’s Song for the PROTOTYPE festival, as well as Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar with Beth Morrison Projects. He has been conductor mentor on two occasions for Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative, leading the premieres of six new operas.

From 2001 to 2008 Steven was Artistic Director of American Opera Projects, where he conducted numerous developmental workshops. He founded the company’s internationally recognized Composers and the Voice Fellowship and remains the program’s Artistic Director. He conducted the premieres of As One in its sold-out run at BAM, and Paula Kimper’s Patience and Sarah at the 1998 Lincoln Center Festival.

Steve has been a member of the Music Staff at The Metropolitan Opera since 2006, with whom he has conducted workshops of several of the company’s commissions. He made his mainstage conducting debut at the Met in 2023 with Dead Man Walking, and returned to conduct Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s Grounded in the 2024/25 season.